Blogs

Drawing on over 30 years of experience in business English teaching and English for Specific Purposes (ESP), primarily in corporate training contexts, Evan Frendo set out to do two things during his webinar for MaWSIG on 5 June 2025: deconstruct English as a business lingua franca (BELF), and discuss its impact on the broader ELT industry, and offer some insights into the world of corporate language training materials and the opportunities it presents for materials writers. This is his summary of his presentation.

In this post, Laurens Lamberts summarises his talk at the MaWSIG Showcase in Edinburgh, where he spoke about the relationship between motivation and gamification, offering a framework to help teachers engage their learners.

In this post, Armanda Stroia summarises her talk at the MaWSIG Webinar Series where she questioned how mainstream localised coursebooks present students with video tasks based on mechanical comprehension checks, suggesting ways to foster 21st century skills and multimodal literacies.

In this post, Kath Bilsborough & John Hughes summarise their presentation at the MaWSIG Showcase in Brighton earlier this year, where they discuss how materials writers come to be.

In this post, Catarina Pontes summarises the talk she gave at the MaWSIG and BrazTESOL Joint Online Conference in November 2023, where she presented five different ways in which teachers can adapt materials to make their learners feel more engaged and make the most of their learning experience.

In this post David Byrne and Mark Heffernan discuss how reading is often presented in EFL materials, and make the case that practice alone does not lead to perfection. They propose an alternative approach, exploring how to write materials that, instead of practising or testing, raise learners’ awareness and development of reading skills.